Claire Moss - Then You Were Gone

‘Why are you so keen for me to go out with him again?’ she had asked.

He had shrugged. ‘I think you’d be good together. You’re both quite similar if you ask me, even though it might not look like it at first glance. Free spirits, if you will.’

Simone had raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Right, OK. But I have to say that in my experience “free spirit” is a phrase people use to describe someone they think will probably sleep with them without asking too many questions first.’

‘You know what I mean. Not needy or desperate or looking for someone to spend every minute of every day with. That’s what you’re both like. I just – I can see you two together. Plus,’ he had leaned forward, ‘he assures me he’s hung like a farmyard animal.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ Simone had said, downing the rest of her drink, and he knew then that he had won her round. And neither of them had said what they both knew; that the real reason he was so keen to set her up with Mack was that he just wanted to see her happy, like he was with Petra. That he wanted her to have someone, like he did.

The bus was nearly at his stop before Jazzy remembered the letter. It had barely occurred to him that it could contain anything interesting, let alone anything personal. Letters never did any more.

Even after he opened the envelope, it took him a few moments to recognise the handwriting, so rarely had he seen Mack handwrite anything. But it was unmistakably from him. The words he used, the confident, stylised penmanship, could not have come from anyone else.

Dear J

I know you’ll be wondering where I am by now, and I’m sorry.

This is the most ridiculous letter I’ve ever written. (And I know, a letter? A fucking letter? Hey, Mack, 1993 called, they want their method of communication back! But the point is, you can’t hack into a letter. And I know that sounds mental, but it’s true, and that’s important).

The thing is, and I swear, I swear on Rory’s life I’m not making this up, I’ve had to go away for a very good reason. I really, really wish I could tell you why, but I can’t, even in an unhackable letter. Just believe me when I say that you’ll be safer, and so will Petra and Rory and everyone else around you if you don’t know (again, I know that sounds like the rantings of a paranoid psychiatric patient but please, please bear with me). Believe me, if I could tell you then you know I would. But it’s a good reason.

And the reason I’m writing to you is because I think – really, really, really – that you could be in danger too, and Petra and Rory if anyone comes looking for me. If anything happened to any of you, I couldn’t live with it. Please listen. Please, please take me seriously. If anyone comes looking for me, you have to say that you don’t know where I am. Which will be true, of course. But you have to make it sound true too, you have to make sure they believe you. And if anyone does come looking, then I think you should take Petra and Rory away for a few days, doesn’t matter where, just don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Not even Simone or Keith.

I’ve written to Simone too, saying the same thing. If you see her, tell her I’m sorry. And, fuck it, tell her that I love her. I do.

One last thing. If you don’t pay attention to anything else in this letter, then please, please pay attention to this. DO NOT TRY AND FIND ME. DO NOT TELL ANYONE I’VE GONE. If anyone comes looking for me you need to LIE. You need to say that I’ve gone on holiday, or quit my job to go travelling, or gone back to Japan or something. Don’t say you’ve heard from me, don’t try and guess where I am. DON’T COME LOOKING FOR ME. And I know that the first thing you’re going to do is ask Keith. Please don’t go to Keith. I mean it. It could put you in danger.

I promise, I haven’t gone round the bend. I know this all sounds nuts but part of the trouble is that you can’t delete stuff once you’ve written it in pen. Please take me seriously.

I wish I could say when I’d be back. I wish I could say that I’m coming back. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I want to come back, and I will if I can. I’m going to try to find a way.

Love you, mate.

Mack.

Jazzy held the letter open in his hand for a few moments, then in a burst of what his rational side told him was absurd paranoia, he folded it over so the text was hidden, casting a surreptitious glance over his shoulder. Everybody else on the bus was looking at a phone or a tablet; nobody was paying him the slightest attention. His first thought was almost certainly the one Mack had been so keen to steer him away from. His friend had surely lost the plot. It happened. It had happened to one of Jazzy’s housemates in his final year of university – too much weed, too much stress over his finals and then one day, boom, he refused to come out of his room and was convinced that the landlord had installed a covert surveillance system inside the airing cupboard.

Jazzy jumped to his feet just in time, realising that the bus was about to pull away from his stop. He hopped down to the pavement and as he walked the few hundred metres to the office, he thought about Mack’s behaviour over the previous few weeks, trying to pinpoint anything that might explain such a sudden descent into extreme paranoia. All he could think, though, was that Mack was just Mack. He was always just Mack. Mack was the kind of guy where someone would say, ‘Well, that’s Mack for you,’ and everybody would know what they meant. And for the last few weeks – for as long as Jazzy could remember in fact – Mack had been behaving entirely as he always did. He had been in and out of the office a lot, but no more than usual, and had seemed quite excited about a number of new leads that he was confident he could turn into regular clients. He had lent Petra a paperback he had just finished reading, raving about it to Jazzy first, and had asked them if they wanted to accompany him and Simone to a gig next month. When Jazzy’s housemate had lost it, although it was a huge and traumatic shock, it had not been a total surprise to Jazzy. The guy had been acting oddly for a long time, perhaps as long as a year – in fact, if he was honest Jazzy would say he had always been a little odd. But the same could not be said of Mack. Mack never acted oddly, he always knew exactly what to say and how to say it, fine-tuning his patter effortlessly depending on the company he was in. It was what made him such a fantastic salesman.

And that stuff about Keith? That was the strangest thing. Jazzy had always thought that Mack may not have exactly liked Keith, but that he at least trusted him. Keith scared Jazzy, he would freely confess it, and he had no idea how to talk to him, knowing as he did nothing about cars, golf or how to objectify women. Keith was like an uncle to Mack; that was what Mack had told him when he first introduced him to Jazzy. What could have gone so wrong that Mack could believe he needed to keep it secret from Keith? A slow, solid feeling of foreboding grew in Jazzy’s stomach, his footsteps slowing as he continued his trudge to the office, as he mulled over that question. He had never thought it was a good idea to let themselves fall into Keith’s orbit as much as they already had. Should he have trusted his instincts? Did Mack mean that the reason he had gone away was somehow Keith’s fault?

They had both been working for Keith for nearly two years now, Mack throwing himself into the enterprise wholeheartedly, Jazzy still insisting to himself, and anyone else, should they ask, that his job there was only a temporary measure until he found something that suited him better.

On New Year’s Eve nearly three years ago, Mack had been drunk and a little maudlin, depressed about his dull but lucrative job as an anti-static flooring salesman, for which, let’s face it, Jazzy could hardly blame him. When Mack had first landed the job, Jazzy had had to laugh. It sounded so much like a parody of the kind of job people settle for when they have given up on life that Jazzy could scarcely believe someone as dynamic, as zestful and trendy as Mack could really have agreed to spend the majority of his waking hours doing such a thing. That New Year Mack was harping on, as he often did, about his ‘plastic business card moment’. Kind of the opposite of a light bulb moment, that was how he described it. The moment when everything went dark.